More DRM Trouble

[Marsden11]

There is a huge difference between piracy and fair use...

What constitutes fair use? Make a copy for yourself or rip the contents and stick it in a folder and seed several hundred bit torrents...All you did was rip it and stick it in a folder. Someone else came along and downloaded it.

A government can not put laws in place that will turn law abiding citizens into criminals...

I don't recall my congress critters putting a gun to my head and ordering me at the pain of death to break the law, any law written in the last two hundred years...Let's be very clear here... every action you do is based on choice. You choose to stay home or go to work. You choose to eat right or not. You choose to share your ripped music or download files via the internet that you do not personally own or have paid for. No one can force you to do anything against your will.You may rationalize your behavior any way you like to justify your actions but breaking the law is breaking the law.We the people should never been allowed to "rip" music from audio CDs. We can buy them and play them in any player or copy them for backup use but letting us "rip" them and share them was a path humans should never have been allowed to go down. DRM is a result of that abuse of "fair" use. Everything else is moot...

[epp_b]

Fair use is basically being able to do whatever you want with the music you legally purchase for your own personal enjoyment, be it: making five copies for around your house, in your car, backup, etc.; transfering to your portable player, editing/mixing, etc.Fair use is violated when the audio in question is mass-distributed on P2P networks without permission, duplicated and sold by the third-party buyer (user), or, in other words, distributed in such a way that it could have been sold to the recipient of the illegaly-distributed file for profit by the original vendor (which is really quite silly, because artists are usually given squat from greedy record labels).

DRM is a result of that abuse of "fair" use. Everything else is moot...

It's also a very flawed result. It's the way corporations can say their battling piracy and at the same time lock users into their products for more revenue. What's this mean? Greed and deceit.

[Marsden11]

Greed and deceit...

Both are very wrong but nevertheless, that does not give us (consumers) the legal or moral right to break the law trying to right an injustice.We live by the rule of law. We elect, or I should say a majority elects those morons in Washington to represent us. They make laws good and bad. Regardless, we are bound by these rules. If we don't like the current laws on the books then it is incumbent upon us to elect new blood to better reflect our views. Otherwise we need to think about moving somewhere else...

[epp_b]

Both are very wrong but nevertheless, that does not give us (consumers) the legal or moral right to break the law trying to right an injustice.

I didn't say that nor did I mean to imply it...but it sure is tempting sometimes the way they treat us. <_<Aren't they, themselves, breaking the law by violating fair-use provisions?

We live by the rule of law. We elect, or I should say a majority elects those morons in Washington to represent us. They make laws good and bad. Regardless, we are bound by these rules. If we don't like the current laws on the books then it is incumbent upon us to elect new blood to better reflect our views.

Yup...this world is full of idiots and the people who vote for them.

Otherwise we need to think about moving somewhere else...

You mean, like, Mars?

[Guest LilBambi]

I don't remember ever equating peer-to-peer filesharing with fair use.Traditionally, piracy was:Commiting murder or robbery, or any act of hostility against a country, or against any citizen of that country, such as on the high seas.http://www.lectlaw.com/def2/p050.htmCopyright infringement was:

Copyright is a statutory or common law right of authors, artists, and developers (or other holders of a copyright) to publish their works, and to prevent others from copying their works. Infringement includes the unauthorized or unlicensed copying of a work subject to copyright. For example, Title 17 of the U.S. Code (which pertains to copyrights) defines the exclusive rights of copyright holders. There are also several provisions which create crimes for copyright infringement.

http://www.techlawjournal.com/glossary/leg...nfringement.aspTraditionally, piracy was punishable by death. Copyright infringement usually involved monetary compensation for the infringement. It is only in recent years that there has been this shift to equate piracy with coypright infringement. And personally, I think they are doing themselves and the public a disservice by equating the two.I have made it very clear here and elsewhere that I don't do peer-to-peer filesharing for copyrighted music, software, movies. If and when I do any filesharing whatsoever -- via something like bittorrent, which I install and uninstall on an as needed basis -- it's for opensource software and audio files under the creative commons license like Leo Laporte's shows, etc. I may also use some form of website downloading of Indie artists' works that they make freely available in mp3 format. But that's it.So when I say Fair Use and piracy are two different things, I mean Fair Use in the traditional sense that I have mentioned in my earlier posts.

Fair Use - What is fair use and what types of uses does the fair use doctrine protect?Answer: Fair use is a defense that can be raised by an individual who is sued for copyright infringement (or an individual against whom a claim of copyright infringement is alleged). The defendant who invokes the fair use defense has to make the case that her or his use of the copyrighted work of another should be legally permitted, notwithstanding the copyright owner's exclusive rights in her work. As Section 107 of the Copyright Act -- codifying the fair use doctrine -- sets forth, "Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A [setting forth the copyright owner's exclusive rights], the fair use of a copyrighted work . . . is not an infringement of copyright."The language used by Congress in Section 107 specifically lists criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research as examples of uses that might be protected under fair use. However, this list is non-exhaustive, and therefore a use not covered in one of the categories could nonetheless be succesfully defended as a fair use. Conversely, not every use that falls within the listed categories will necessarily be found by a court to be fair. For example, not every use of another's work for research or educational purposes will be held to be a fair use.In considering a fair use defense to a claim of infringement, a court will focus it inquiry on the specific facts of the individual case. Therefore, it is very difficult to predict with accuracy what a court will do until it engages in the inquiry. What we do know is that a court will use the four factors listed by Congress as a guide in its inquiry. The four factors listed are:1. the purpose and character of the use (the more transformative defendant's use, the more likely to be fair use, whereas if defendant merely reproduces plaintiff's work without putting it to a transformative use, the less likely this use will be held to be fair; further, the more commercial defendant's use, the less likely such use will be fair),2. the nature of the copyrighted work (first, the more creative and less purely factual the copyrighted work, the stronger its protection; second, if a copyrighted work is unpublished, it will be harder to establish that defendant's use of it was fair),3. the amount and substantiality of the portion defendant used (did defendant copy nearly all of, or the heart of, the copyrighted work? If so, such use is less likely to be fair), and4. the effect of defendant's use on the potential market or the copyrighted work.The fourth factor -- the effect of defendant's use on plaintiff's market (or potential market) for her creative work -- generally is held to be the most important.

http://www.chillingeffects.org/fairuse/faq.cgi#QID495Traditionally, as individuals, if we owned a copy of a copyrighted work (say an music album, a movie; we could copy it, say to another piece/type of medium for convenience, or make a backup copy so we would not lose what we purchased (such as in the case of children making use of it). We could even make a copy of radio, TV programs, etc. for example to timeshift when we couldn't view it. This was as far as I understand it, considered to be nonsubstantial copyright infringement and permissable because they were for our own personal use...as long as we were not selling them to make a profit which was the right of copyright owners. These things did not infringe on "the effect of defendant's use on the potential market or the copyrighted work" as noted above in #4. Mainly because there was no money involved, and no real loss to the copyright holder. If someone already owned it, they were unlikely to buy it again.There were also other noninfringing uses of music etc., such as things like singing "Happy Birthday" at a birthday party. Singing a song for our own personal enjoyment, no matter where we were, as long as it wasn't for a recording to be sold to the public. Local bands have been basically granted a fair use right to perform their own rendition of copyrighted songs in clubs etc. since the beginning of time, or at least copyright holders have traditionally turned a deaf ear on it. Why? Because it doesn't hurt their sales, in fact, it may just be free advertising.

[Cluttermagnet]

Best thread I've read here for a long time- and there have been some good ones.It's all about control, folks. And I've had big control issues since 'before the beginning'.It's called freedom, it's called liberty, and it's called privacy. Either you have them or you don't. We're all in the process of losing them, big time. We just can't see the forest for the trees. It's a pretty big forest, and it's about to land squarely on our heads. For a model of where we're all headed, think 'middle ages'. Think 'feudalism'. Think lords in castles and serfs elsewhere getting eaten by wolves. It's really that bad. Can't you see it yet?Come on!!!!!!!!!All I want to do is to take a few good songs off an album I legally own (or do I?- heh heh heh) and combine them with other good songs in my own CD or cassette compilations. Yes, I still record on cassettes. And I still buy and play and record from vinyl. The morons at Sony (and elsewhere) don't even want me to be able to rip strictly for personal use. I will never again buy anything Sony. Anything. I have never yet seen an album sooooo good that every single song in it is 'golden'. Might happen in a perfect world some day. Not here. Fair use would allow me to do this, to split off the few I like. OK, we can quibble over whether or not I should 'gift' even one close friend with a wonderful compilation specifically crafted for them. I think this is already quite illegal, but notice that no money changes hands, and you'd probably never be able to convince me that this harms 'their' sales one whit- quite the contrary, it probably either has no effect or else increases 'their' sales as a result of increased exposure for 'their' artists. While I don't play the p2p downloading game, I am nonetheless already engaged in 'criminal activity' (gasp!). When the law becomes 'illegal', people lose respect for the law, and that is where we are now headed, in a big hurry. There's a word for this: "anomie", which means a weakened respect for the norm. I picked that one up a while back. French in origin, I believe. I've been hard-pressed to find it in most dictionaries, however. There aren't yet words in any dictionary that adequately describe what's happening here, but it's evil...I feel for you folks who are still heavily invested in video distractions of all sorts. Those things lost me way back when. Television used to rule my life. But most of what's on there is crap. I'm one of the few lucky ones- I broke free, I escaped with my life. I still do watch the occasional worthy ones- say Nova on PBS, a good comedy, maybe just a little of the 'latest bad news' for my daily/ semi-weekly 'news' fix- that's about it. Can you say "...vast wasteland..."? I can. And I'm a better person for it. But it is distressing to watch as my fellow citizens are increasingly exploited, manipulated, and victimized by very bad product and practices. Ugh! The very popularity of the internet derives in part from its 'wild west' look and feel. 'They' haven't yet figgered out how to completely control it, to throttle it. Yet. You can still find a hint of the truth here. Don't look to your six o'clock news for that any more... In the past, these debates in Scot's Forums have boiled over and threads have eventually been closed. Yep, people get angry when they are treated like fools- and cash cows. But others have become heavily invested in the process, and participate in carving their 'pound of flesh' from their fellow citizens. We'll continue to clash as our society increasingly shakes out into a feudal 'haves' and 'have nots' culture. There won't be a big revolution. It definitely 'won't be televised'. It won't happen very fast. We'll just sink quietly back into the ooze, because we were unworthy of our freedoms. Increasingly, a person's group identity (peasant or nobility) will become denoted by their *actual* embracement of or rejection of 'the law', a weapon increasingly being wielded against us all (as opposed to any public professions of their 'loyalty' to an increasingly inhumane 'law').

Edited November 18, 2005 by Cluttermagnet

[epp_b]

There aren't yet words in any dictionary that adequately describe what's happening here, but it's evil...

Hmm...the words "greed" and "deceit" come to mind.BTW, very good post Cluttermagnet. You hit the nail square on the head -- I don't think there's anything much I could possibly add to that.

[Cluttermagnet]

Hmm...the words "greed" and "deceit" come to mind.BTW, very good post Cluttermagnet. You hit the nail square on the head -- I don't think there's anything much I could possibly add to that.

Thanks, epp! I loved your rant on page 1. Good ol' soapbox speech at its finest. Loved the boldface and the 'smilies'. Heh! Oh, er- and your're right, mate!

[Guest LilBambi]

Yes, epp_b's absolutely right ... you certainly did hit the nail squarely on the head, Cluttermagnet!Thank you!Great to see your wonderful posts again too.